Freedom’s Price, Safety’s Danger

Freedom’s Price, Safety’s Danger — Sunday night’s massacre in Las Vegas — which as of this writing (Oct. 3) has left 59 dead and more than 500 injured — is providing fodder for the politically ambitious. More gun control is needed, they say. More restrictions on movement and convenience will keep us safe they say.

Of course, they couldn’t be more wrong.

Even now the motivations of murderer Stephen Craig Paddock are trying to be determined. Federal authorities have not found a terrorism connection despite the claims of ISIS. The best guess now is that he was a calculating psychopath akin to Andrew Kehoe, the middle-aged school board treasurer and community leader who spent months planting dynamite throughout the Bath Consolidated School, killing 45 including 36 children when he set off the explosives in 1927.

People like this are no different than hurricanes and earthquakes. Putting ink on paper in the form of new laws won’t stop them. They can’t be stopped. They hide among us as pillars of the community — Paddock was an accountant — without giving a hint as to what’s inside them constantly considering a community’s weak points. They exist in every society even totalitarian ones.

Actually, they end up running the totalitarian ones and it’s living in fear to the point one is willing to surrender freedom that puts them in charge.

While they can’t be stopped, preparations can be taken. Just as supplies can be stored for hurricanes, sane, law-abiding citizens can be encouraged to know how to defend themselves for psychopaths. This means having a gun.

And our culture can be made into one where life is revered and the ethic of protecting the weak and helpless is paramount.